Georges Vacher de Lapouge
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Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854-1936) was a French anthropologist and a theoretician of eugenics and pseudo-scientific racism. He was also a member of the SFIO socialist party.
He wrote L'Aryen et son rôle social (1899, "The Aryan and his Social Role"), which gave its bases to Nazi anti-semitism. He opposed the white, "Aryan race", "dolichocephalic", to the "brachycephalic" race, whom the "Jew" is the archetype. Vacher de Lapouge thus classified "human races": first the Homo europaeus, Nordic or fair-hair and Protestant, then the Homo alpinus, represented by the Auvergnat and the Turk, finally the Homo mediterraneus, figured by the Neapoletan or the Andaluz.
Vacher de Lapouge introduced in France Francis Galton's eugenics, but applied it to his theory of races. As Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658-1722) before him, he believed that the Homo europaeus formed the upper class of French society, whereas the Homo mediterraneus was represented by the workers. Race, according to him, thus became a synonym of social class. But, in virtue of "heredity", the Homo europaeus intrinsically possessed more qualities than the lower, Homo mediterraneus. He added to this conception of races and classes "sélectionnisme" ("selectionism"), his version of Galton's eugenics. Vacher de Lapouge's "selectionism" had two aims: first, achieving the annihilation of trade unionists, considered as "degenerate"; second, creating types of man each destined to one end, in order to prevent any contestation of labour conditions. His anthropology thus aimed at blocking social conflict by establishing a fixed, hierarchical social order [1]
[edit] References
- ^ Matsuo Takeshi (University of Shimane, Japan). L'Anthropologie de Georges Vacher de Lapouge: Race, classe et eugénisme (Georges Vacher de Lapouge anthropology) in Etudes de langue et littérature françaises 2001, n°79, pp. 47-57. ISSN 0425-4929 ; INIST-CNRS, Cote INIST : 25320, 35400010021625.0050 (Abstract resume on the INIST-CNRS
[edit] Bibliography
- L'Aryen et son rôle social (1899, "The Aryan and his Social Role"
- Social Selections
[edit] See also
- Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658-1722) - believed that the French aristocracy were descendants of the Franks, and that the Third Estate was composed of the "inferior", Gallo-Roman "racial stock"
- William Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe (1899)
